Lights Out in the Reptile House (2 page)

The sun was blinding. In the next front garden Mr. Fetscher sat hatless despite it, scraping potato peels into a metal bucket as if scraping potatoes were precision work. They nodded to each other, and Karel walked down the street to the Schieles'. When he got there he peered over the tall and prickly hedge but did not see Leda. Her mother came into view instead with clothespegs in her mouth. She caught his eye and he ducked below the hedge line, embarrassed to be so often caught hanging around. He headed instead toward the square, reminding himself to walk with some show of purpose. His father always complained that he seemed to just drift around when outside.

He believed himself to be in love with Leda. She wasn't really his girlfriend. When she wasn't home on weekends she was usually in the square, trapped with other girls her age in the semicompulsory League of Young Mothers. It was organized locally by a dim-witted farmer's wife whose main qualification to the regime, besides her ferocious belief in everything she was told, was her having had eleven children. They were all glumly present at the meetings, pressed into service to swell the crowd when they would rather have been anywhere else. The league was composed otherwise of twelve-to-sixteen-year-old girls. They stood around and itched and squinted in the heat. The farmer's wife performed for them household chores as they'd been done before the people had lost their sense of their own heroic history, their special characteristics and mission. She beat clothes on a rock. She threshed grain by hand. The girls were not the best audience. Whatever their enthusiasm (or lack of it) for the new regime there was a universal sense that in terms of household chores the glorious old ways were backbreaking and idiotic.

Boys loitered around the square to hoot and show off and otherwise establish themselves as annoyances. Karel usually found an unobtrusive position across from Leda where he could watch her in peace. She saw him sometimes and half-rolled her eyes to communicate how dreary and pointless she found all of this. At other times she didn't notice him. At no point did she seem to recognize or acknowledge that she was the sole focus of his attention.

She wasn't there. She'd been missing more of these things. He admired and envied her independence even as he regretted the lost opportunities to see her.

Old men contemptuous of the regime sat under the café awnings and followed the farmer's wife's efforts with head shakes and derisive low comments, hawking and spitting in the dust. She was holding up a whisk, to a purpose Karel could not make out. He decided to wait around on the chance Leda would show up late, and because he had nothing else to do.

Besides the old men in the café he could see three uniformed men lounging around a table. They wore the pale gray uniforms with black-and-white trim of the Civil Guard. The one clearly in charge was a handsome man with impressive cheekbones. They seemed uninterested in the league. One of the old men bumped the one in charge, and then said something. The other two uniformed men looked away. The one in charge seemed composed. He stood, took the old man's hand in his, and flexed it back onto itself, so that Karel could hear the cracking where he was. The old man howled and went down on his knees, and the one in charge let him go. There was a small uproar. The other old men surrounded the one in charge, who turned from them and took his seat as if he had no further interest in the incident. Karel thought something would happen but the uniformed man turned, again, and looked at the old men, and they stopped what they were doing. They helped the hurt one up. They escorted him across the square. He held his hand out in front of him and made small outcries. The uniformed man looked over at Karel and saw him watching. He did not look upset or surprised. The other two uniformed men leaned closer to say something to him, and he nodded, still looking at Karel.

Karel's face heated, and he backed into the shade. Some children on the other side of the square were playing a game involving beating each other on the arms with whip-like reeds. The dust rose at their feet like miniature weather patterns. Where the road began to lead out of town, passersby swerved to touch a begging midget for luck. Under the awning near the uniformed men a large dog, tawny in the sunlight, placed a paw on a smaller dog's back, as if to hold it still for contemplation.

He moved farther from the café and the uniformed man's gaze. With Leda gone he tried eyeing other girls. He felt the uniformed man watching with him. A blonde too old for the meeting sat on a bench in the shade with a vacant expression and her hands crossed on her knees. Her lower lip was drawn slightly into her mouth. She bobbed her head every so often against the occasional flies. He looked back at the café, and the uniformed men were gone.

He had written on his last school essay that he was not unhappy never talking to anyone or getting to know anyone well. His teacher had disapproved and commented on his unhealthy attitude. He'd thought of explaining later that like everyone else he wanted to be part of things, but had not. He was not popular in school. He had his reptiles and the Reptile House, but besides Leda, no friends. He had at some point become a hesitant, stammering speaker, and he blamed his father. He was excluded from all cliques, including the outsiders' clique. At times he would stand in a group listening to the talk and someone would say something incomprehensible or meaningless and the group would break into noisy laughter, leaving him standing there like an imbecile, like a tourist subjected to obscure jokes by the natives.

The blond girl drew her hair slowly back into a ponytail and held it, her elbows out. He envied in people like her their effortless adaptation to the world. He was always puzzling it out, trying to understand and possess by observation. He never succeeded, and he was usually left with something like a sad, studious awe for the spectacle around him.

The league meeting was winding down. He turned from the square and came face to face with the uniformed man from the café. His breath stopped, and the man lowered his eyelids and smiled. There was a badge on his chest of a sword penetrating a nest of snakes into a skull. He moved aside to let Karel by. Karel left at a trot, following two men hauling a pig by the nose and legs to a waiting cart.

He wanted to tell his father about the uniformed man, but naturally his father was gone. He spent the rest of the day in the shade of the back garden watching red-and-black diamondback beetles climb his chair leg. The street was completely quiet. The uniformed man's gaze still bothered him, and he worked to put it out of his mind. He thought about storm surges and swelling green waves in the funnel-like bay below their old house. The houses had been packed so tightly into the cliff slope that he could spit into his neighbor's window. The third floor on one side was the ground floor on the other. Red brick patios with weedy gardens stepped downward and dropped away to the port below. Lines of foam edged the beaches.

His new house was flat and dry and hemmed in by desert. All there was for him here was reptiles and Leda. Some ants were circling the flybag at his feet, interested in the bran and milk mash. He picked up the faint dry smell of sage and something else and thought of the sea smell from his old home, especially after a rain.

His father did not come back for dinner, and he made for himself a thick bean soup with some onions and a little meat. He ate it out in the back garden, listening. When it was dark enough that his plate was only a dim glow on his lap he went inside. At the kitchen table he drank some coffee, the sound of the metal cup on the saucer desolate and thin. He sighed and leafed through his reptile study sheets until he found a buried take-home essay he had neglected, due Monday. Across the top he had doodled the labials of the Komodo dragon, and along one column he'd drawn a desert iguana improbably perched in a creosote bush. He reminded himself with dismay that he had to erase all of this. Near the iguana's open mouth he'd written:
Karel Roeder. Standard Seven. Political Studies
. That was as far as he had gotten. The questions were unappetizing. He knew what his instructor wanted—only the chronically absent or stone-deaf didn't—but had no enthusiasm for organizing the material into something readable. He reread the questions the way he would read the ingredients on a can he had no intentions of opening. He read his notes for the answers, scribbled underneath as the question sheets had been passed out:

—man can live only as member of nation, therefore nation transcends group interests. Strong only as cohesive unit
.

—Committee of Representatives institution that “expresses political agreement of Government and Nation.” “Documents unity of Leader and Nation
.”

—
Party inseparable from Gov
.

—
Party functions by finding and uniting most capable people “thru selection conditioned by day-to-day struggle
.”

He flopped it over. He'd finish it tomorrow. He sat at the kitchen table listening to the clock, unhappy, and when it reached ten he got up and climbed the stairs to his bedroom. He left the lidded pot with the remainder of the bean soup and a spoon and a bowl on the table where his father would see them.

From his bedroom he could make out a policeman talking in the glow of a telephone box. The town was dark except for an occasional window and a single bulb lighting the square in the distance. He turned his light out and stayed where he was in the darkness, waiting for his father, or the Schieles, or someone. He saw no movement except the lighter tones of passing clouds. He pulled a chair over and dozed and woke to see the dark shapes of dogs standing in people's front gardens and peering in their windows. When he fell back asleep even his dreams had become dull and bland, absorbed with packing and unpacking large suitcases from a trunk.

School was closed, Monday, with a curt sign posted on the chained double doors announcing it would reopen in a week. The official reason provided was unsafe stairways that demanded immediate attention. Karel's father said the real reason was the realignment of the teaching staff. Whatever the reason, Karel lay quiet in his bed Tuesday morning, his arms at his sides, in gratitude.

His father knocked once and said without opening the door that Albert had called from the zoo and had asked if he wanted to work extra hours in view of his free time this week. He could hear his father's resentment at having to pass on such messages, and he regretted it. When he came downstairs he said, “Who wants coffee?” rubbing his hands together in a parody of anticipation, but the house was empty.

He bought a small hard roll at the café and ate it on the way over to the zoo, wishing he had some juice. The zoo was on a rise along the south end of town, with a view over the square to the northern mountains. It was considered one of the attractions of the region. The new regime was enlarging its budget, and Karel hoped his apprenticeship would become a full position. The site was already bounded by an old stone wall and was being further surrounded by a moat. The moat was at that point a trench. There was to be a bigger restaurant, a concert garden, a monkey island, a new pheasantry, and expanded maintenance and administration buildings. The zoo held, besides the Reptile House, flamingos, cranes, parrots, and endless other birds, camels, llamas, tapirs, wild asses, antelope, bears, wolves, bison, ibex, wild sheep, bongos, gaurs, all sorts of deer, a mountain lion, and three monkeys. They were organized haphazardly, isolated from the looping walkways provided for visitors. In a corner of the complex a square pit represented the promised aquarium. A sign advertized its coming attractions. The centerpiece of the advertising was a lurid painting of some piranha (“the Sanitary Police of South American Rivers”). The Reptile House was next to the pit, near some neglected boojum trees. It was made of ugly yellow brick. A drab sign with an adder's head in silhouette marked the door. As a department of the zoo it was inadequately supported. In terms of commonly shared materials it always had to make do with whatever the mammal or bird staffs had discarded or could spare. Even with that, it was a model of organization and cleanliness. It held 301 reptiles in 116 species and was roofed with louvered shutters over tessellated glass to control the daylight. There was a crocodile hall and tiers for lizards, tortoises, and snakes. The louvered shutters worked badly but were supposedly to be fixed. There were some prize exhibits: a giant tortoise, a green-and-yellow crested basilisk, an impressive poisonous snake collection, including an albino krait, and two nine-foot Komodo dragons. Karel spent most of his time helping with the feeding and cleaning cages. He had less contact with the prize exhibits but visited them before and after work and was sure a promotion would mean greater responsibilities in those areas.

At the service entrance one of the older staff members looked at him indifferently when he arrived and dumped a sack of rotten turnips at his feet. Karel checked the menial work orders at the food kitchens and storehouses, the hospital, the quarantine station, and the masons' workshops. In the carpenters' workshop three men and an apprentice were standing around a box trap as if it were impossibly complex or mysterious. He could hear what he guessed to be the nearby male ibex butting heads; the sound was like great rocks being driven together.

Albert passed him from behind, carrying a sack of fish heads. He said only “Good morning,” and nodded to indicate Karel should follow. They crossed to the Reptile House, white hairs atop the old man's head waving lazily in the breeze. He was wearing a white lab coat that had a footprint on the back of it. They entered the building through the rear and stopped opposite the enclosure for the giant tortoise so Albert could scrutinize its carapace at length. He eyed one side especially critically, pointing out a stretch of what looked like mold. He didn't say anything. In response to their attention the tortoise rose up on her feet, considered movement, and lowered herself down again.

“Ever feed her something like that?” Karel asked, to break the silence. He indicated the sack of fish heads.